Tag Archives: Docklands Light Railway

The perspective is not quite the same, but I think you can just make out that Shirley Wheeler is standing in the left-hand of the two bridge spans.

Disused railway line, Poplar, 6 August 1984.

Docklands Light Railway, Poplar, 4 September 2014.

This is the view just north-east of Poplar station on the Docklands Light Railway line heading up towards Stratford. The bridge carries Poplar High Street across the tracks. Just over 30 years separates the two photographs.

The first photo was taken when ‘Docklands’ was just a developer’s wild idea. The second was taken this afternoon. In the summer of 1984 Shirley was looking up at the birds nesting under the eaves of the derelict building — house martins I think they were, or swallows perhaps. We’d spent the day wandering the vast broken landscape of the Isle of Dogs, from Mudchute and Millwall up here to Poplar. Much of the former industry had been bulldozed or had just fallen down in abandonment. Everywhere was a riot of flowers and birdsong. We picked blackberries from the old railway embankments. I found the peculiar plant-hopper Asiraca clavicornis, for the first time. It’s a regular on London brownfields still, but is rare elsewhere in the UK.

The massive redevelopment started soon after our visit, and is continuing even now. Each time I travel on the DLR there is more construction going on somewhere as more plots are infilled. I don’t want to get too maudlin, but I do mourn the loss of what was, at the time, London’s largest nature reserve.

The Bugman

CURIOUS? WHY CURIOUS?

When 17th century apothecary and naturalist James Petiver published a picture of what, for 200 years, would be Britain's most enigmatic butterfly, Albin's Hampstead Eye, he reported: "Where it was caught by this curious person". His implication was that Eleazar Albin was not just strange, not just odd, but was fuelled by curiosity.

Ongoing projects:

These are some of the books and other projects going on at the moment......

WASP

Dylan Thomas wondered deeply about the worth of wasps. Although we are not told which authors wrote them, among the 'useful' presents he recieved were 'books that told me everything about the wasp, except why. This is the why.

Beetles — in the Collins New Naturalist series

I like beetles, I like them very much indeed, so I wrote a book about them.

Call of nature: the secret life of dung

A key selling point is the fact that the spine of the book is adorned with an elephant's bottom. Publication: February 2017.

House guests, house pests

A natural history of animals in the home. Click here for details of how to get the now scarce hardback.

The paperbacks were released into the wild in February 2016

How to be a curious entomologist

A series of introductory 'how to' workshops/ seminars. Click here for follow-up information.

Mosquito

Published August 2012. How an irritating but trivial gnat became imbued with dark menace well beyond its diminutive size.